What may sound like a carnival of infidelity ("What happens at CheatFest stays at CheatFest") is actually an event held at the put-in spot for Cheat Canyon each year to raise awareness for various Cheat River watershed conservation advocacy issues, and to bring hundreds of paddlers together for a lot of fun. This second agenda was spot on this year, starting with a downriver race through the class 3/4 whitewater on Friday evening. I arrived on Wednesday and commuted from Morgantown while working through the day and paddling the race course in the
evenings. I camped with an acquaintance from DC who seemed like a relatively normal guy until the party on Saturday night, when he arrived under-dressed.Friday came, the race went on without a hitch (I placed somewhere around 25th of 150), and the crowd grew to capacity by Saturday evening as live bands like Stewed Mulligan kept us dancing all night. On Saturday afternoon, I was lucky enough to have some friends show me down the Upper Yough (Yes!! New Run!!) , but that's in Maryland (eeewwwww), so I won't say anything more about it, other than I did it again on Monday and swam!
On Saturday night, perhaps in a state of inebriation, a friend suggested to me that I give my credit card to one of the kayak vendors in return for a tandem whitewater kayak. The credit card part was only collateral because we were just using it for the day. Oh my was it ever worth it.
Safety issues aside, my decision to "borrow" the boat was one of my better ones. At least a half dozen of us ended up paddling
some part of the canyon in it, and some even surfed it at two favorite playspots called Typewriter and Cue Ball. If you were REALLY unlucky, you got to swim out of the thing after flipping, like I did twice.Addendum: The aforementioned swim was declared a HALF of a swim, so my Upper Yough record is 1/2 swim for two runs, for a 25% record. That's not so bad, but I intend to decrease that number. The reason it was declared to be a half swim is because my friend Dan was stuck in a hole when I came upon him. So, it's Dan's fault, and he gets 1.5 swims for the day. My momentum knocked him out, which left me in the hole. I held on for a while and side-surfed on both sides before my only option was to flip to see what happened. What happened was that I swam.
Gittin' 'r Dun.
